Book Review: Brain Damage by J.A. St. Thomas

I wasn’t sure about this one at first – I liked the beginning, but it wasn’t sucking me in the way I hoped it would (it felt a little too “teenage angst”), until all of a sudden I just found myself hooked… I can’t point to what did it, but at some point early on it shifted and felt like more than the typical YA story arc (a “misfit” kid that doesn’t quite fit in turns out to be more than anyone – himself included – expected) it appeared to be at the start. From there, things got weirder and weirder and more intriguing, and by the end I was thoroughly engaged and couldn’t wait to see what the Big Reveal would turn out to be. It both was and wasn’t a surprise – it was on one level, but on the other, when I stopped to consider it, it was not, if that makes any sense – but regardless, it was a page turner for me in the final bits, and I quite enjoyed it.

There are a lot of YA novels that read like adult books without the gratuitous sex and violence; this read like a YA novel (despite its abundance of gruesome moments), but was no less enjoyable to me as an adult reader for that fact. The issues Des faces are, by and large, quite relatable even to one who is rather a bit past sixteen, and the paranormal/”dead people” components of the story were managed well and with cool semi-oblique text inserts that made them feel non-cliched and fresh.

My review copy was provided by NetGalley.